There's a really interesting split of opinion on this. I wonder how much that aligns with the commenters personal ownership of cryptocurrecy. If anyone's willing to share their usage with their comment, that may help explain the split.<p>Personally, I had about $50 on coinbase at one point. As I felt that I wasn't "getting" cryptocurrency. Once I was satisfied that it wasn't useful to me I moved almost all of it out, although I still have some "dust" which seems too small to spend.<p>Coinbase seems designed to look like a trading platform, they feature graphs that show historical gains (and IIRC tweak the timelines of those graphs so they are always looking like the trend is up... super scammy...). I've only purchased one thing with coinbase, mostly because I thought that was a good way to move funds out. So personally, I didn't get value and I'm not going to lose money if Coinbase/cryptocurrencies tank.<p>The securities question appears to boil down to three questions:<p>1. expectation of profits<p>2. a common enterprise<p>3. depends “solely” for its success on the efforts of others.<p>For #1, coinbase appears to actively hype that with their "graph goes up" design. Their "learning" tool asserts that many tokens also have utility, but that seems only aspirational. Shouldn't coinbase track which tokens they feature actually have utility, avoid listing any that don't yet have usage, and delist any tokens when it's clear they have no utility? They have the data to assess that.<p>For #2, I'm honestly not familiar with the term.<p>For #3, this seems tied up in #1. If the token has utility, then the coinbase user could "use it" and engage in the market for non-speculative reasons, which should make it go up in value. If there is no utility, then there's nothing the user can personally do to increase the value.<p>But all this seems like a distraction to me. Coinbase seems deceptive to me in how they promote tokens to users. It's clearly a gambling platform that is trying to sprinkle on just enough "utility" to skirt the rules. The law and guidelines will eventually get updated, I don't think coinbase is entitled to SEC clarifications faster than the SEC is ready to share them. SEC is not their personal lawyer. A company trying to skirt the law with careful positioning should understand they are operating a risky business.